There’s a scene in the 2011 film “Moneyball” that vividly illustrates how easy it is to assume something is simple thing when it really isn’t. 

Brad Pitt, playing Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, is trying to convince Chris Pratt, portraying free agent Scott Hatteberg, to sign with Oakland. The catch, so to speak, is that Hatteberg wouldn’t be signed to play at his traditional position, catcher, but to play first base, which he has never done before.

“It’s not that hard, Scott,” says Beane, who then gestures over to infield coach Ron Washington, portrayed by Brent Jennings. “Tell him, Wash.”

“It’s incredibly hard,” Washington says. 

“Hey, anything worth doing is,” Beane replies. 

The scene is played for laughs, but it does communicate a universal truth: Anything worth doing is incredibly hard.

Which brings us to cutting the federal budget. 

The nascent “Department of Government Efficiency,” a presidential advisory group for the incoming Trump administration headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is ramping up and looking to recommend cuts of up to $2.5 trillion to the federal budget. 

Whether it’s the novelty of Musk’s profile or the confidence that characterizes a political party coming off a big win or the questions concerning what kind of public entity this is — whether it will be subject to open meeting laws, etc. — the “DOGE” has already earned notoriety on Capitol Hill, with even some bipartisan support and an official House subcommittee to ride shotgun. 

Musk seems comfortable cutting things, like Twitter, now known as X, from which he culled about 80 percent of the workforce after purchasing the social media platform in 2022. 

But Congress, which would need to sign off on many DOGE-related edicts, doesn’t like to cut things. Pretty much ever. 

Consider, if you will, one of the more well-equipped and capable efforts in the recent past: the 2011 Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, more affectionately known as the “super committee.” Comprising 12 members of Congress — six Democrats and six Republicans, evenly divided between the House and Senate — the panel was borne out of a standoff over the debt ceiling. 

Its creation as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011 tasked the bipartisan, bicameral committee to recommend at least $1.2 trillion in budget cuts over a 10-year window. If seven members of the panel voted to forward such a recommendation, it would proceed to floor votes under expedited rules, avoiding procedural hurdles in favor of a simple up-or-down vote. 

The 2011 BCA was passed by a Republican House and a Democratic Senate and signed into law by President Barack Obama in August 2011. The committee had a deadline to vote on recommendations by Nov. 23, 2011. 

There were consequences for failure: A so-called sequester, or set of automatic spending cuts totaling $1.2 trillion spread over nine years, would be triggered starting in January 2013, cutting equally between domestic and defense spending, with entitlements like Social Security and other popular programs exempted. 

They failed anyway.

The super committee’s co-chairs, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and ex-Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, released a wistful statement throwing in the towel: “After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline,” they said, adding, “Despite our inability to bridge the committee’s significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation’s fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve.”

For the record, it has been a little over 13 years since that statement came out — roughly a generation, give or take a few years. While some sequester cuts did indeed go into effect, Congress found ways around the most unpopular cuts over the years, blunting everything but the most obvious nips and tucks. 

Despite the ease with which government is depicted as some vast, sprawling conspiracy to make people’s lives miserable, every program, every military base, every agency, every highway, every nature trail, every combat fighter and every IT support system has its patron in Congress. Otherwise it wouldn’t be there. 

It’s not the same thing to fire a bunch of people at a company you own and for which you don’t even have to answer to shareholders because you took it private. 

If things were easy to cut, they’d be cut. 

But they aren’t. 

Cutting the federal budget sounds simple, and in some respects the way to do it is: Cut costs, raise revenue or, to put it another way, cut programs and benefits (because someone always benefits from even the smallest program) and raise taxes. 

But doing that?

To quote Wash: “It’s incredibly hard.”